Tag: Attack Surface Reduction

Today, we released an update to address a vulnerability in Group Policy Preferences (MS14-025). Group Policy Preferences was an addition made to Group Policy to extend its capabilities. Among other things, Group Policy Preferences allows an administrator to configure: Local administrator accounts (name of the account, account password, etc) Configure a service or scheduled task…

There are several interesting “stories” to tell about security update MS12-034: Addressing the Duqu vulnerability again? Why so many affected products? Keyboard layout behavior introduced with Windows Vista conditionally applied down-level Addressing the Duqu vulnerability again? Five months ago, we released security update MS11-087 to address CVE-2011-3402, a vulnerability that was being exploited by the…

This month we released MS11-090 to address a vulnerability in the Microsoft Time component (CVE-2011-3397), which features the deprecated time behavior that is still supported in IE6. We would like to provide further information about this issue and help explain why a “binary behavior kill bit” is the appropriate course of action. Which products are…

Today, we released MS11-087 addressing an issue in the font parsing subsystem of win32k.sys, CVE-2011-3402. The bulletin received a Critical rating due to a potential browser-based attack vector. We have not seen the browser-based attack vector exploited in the wild. The bulletin includes a workaround to disable this remote code execution attack surface. You might…

The single Critical vulnerability in today’s batch of security updates addresses an issue in the Bluetooth stack. Your workstations’ risk to this vulnerability varies, depending on a number of factors. I’d like to use this blog post to outline those risk factors. How can I protect my system? The best way to protect any potentially…

Today we released security update MS11-056 to address vulnerabilities in the Windows Client/Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS) and Console Host (conhost.exe). We also closed an internally found elevation of privilege attack vector on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, significantly reducing the opportunity for any console issues discovered in the future to result in elevation…

Today, we released MS11-050, a cumulative security update for Internet Explorer to address several vulnerabilities in IE9. The following table lists the CVEs included in MS11-050, and whether each affects IE8 or IE9. CVE Rating IE8 IE9 CVE-2011-1246 Moderate Yes No CVE-2011-1258 Moderate Yes No CVE-2011-1252 Important Yes No CVE-2011-1256 Important Yes No CVE-2011-1255 Critical…

Today we released Security Advisory 2501696 to alert customers to a publicly disclosed vulnerability in the MHTML protocol handler. This vulnerability could allow attackers to construct malicious links pointing to HTML documents that, when clicked, would render the targeted document and reflected script in the security context of the user and target location. The end…

IE8 behavior notes MS09-019 contains the fix for the IE8 vulnerability responsibly disclosed by Nils at the CanSecWest pwn2own competition (CVE-2009-1532). Nils exploited this vulnerability on an IE8 build that did allow .NET assemblies to load in the Internet Zone. The final, released build of IE8 does not allow .Net assemblies to load in the…

Recently, we found a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s DirectShow platform (quartz.dll) when processing the QuickTime format. We have released advisory 971778 providing guidance to help protect customers. We’d like to go into more detail in this blog to help you understand: Which configurations are at risk? Why is this a high risk vulnerability? How…